Astrophysical Supercomputing with GPUs: Critical Decisions for Early Adopters

A paper recently published by the Astronomical Society of Australia on how GPGPUs are dramatically changing the landscape of high performance computing in astronomy.This paper identifies and investigates several key decision areas, with a goal of simplifying the early adoption of GPGPU in astronomy. The merits of OpenCL are considered as an open standard in order to reduce risks associated with coding in a native, vendor-specific programming environment, and present a GPU programming philosophy based on using brute force solutions.